Preface

Developers who have done integration work know what a difficult task it can be. IT systems may not have been designed to be accessible from other systems, and if they were designed for interoperability, they may not speak the protocol you need. As a developer, you end up spending a considerable amount of time working with the plumbing of the integration protocols to open up the IT systems to the outside world.

In Enterprise Integration Patterns, Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf gave us a standard way to describe, document, and implement complex integration problems. Developers and architects alike can use this common language and catalog of solutions to tackle their integration problems. But although Hohpe and Woolf gave us the theory, the industry still needed an open source implementation of the book.

James Strachan, Rob Davies, Guillaume Nodet, and Hiram Chirino, within the open source communities of Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix, brought the idea of Camel to life. Apache Camel is essentially an implementation of the EIP book, and in the summer of 2007 version 1.0 was released.